


Let Me Sleep

by almina



Category: Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 03:04:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11842638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almina/pseuds/almina
Summary: Jack Glover feels responsible for Doss, and senses when the kid needs him.





	Let Me Sleep

Jack Glover could not sleep. Not a surprise after this day of adrenaline and triumph. You had to shut down the scenes of death, turn off the shrieks of the wounded, stop the milling thoughts of what you could have handled better. You had to sleep. Just had to. Glover had seen perfectly competent soldiers make horrendous mistakes simply because they had gone too long without sleep. He could usually give himself an order, "Sleep. Sleep now." He'd lie still and sleep would come. But tonight after finally taking Hacksaw, he could not shut down the bright raw memories. One of them anyway. Doss, that bloody limp heap of flesh he had delivered to the surgeons. He had to see Doss. No, his rational mind said. Let it wait until morning. It is more important that you sleep than that you see that young man who saved so many, used up his luck, and finally took more bullets than the surgeons bothered to count as they extracted them. Desmond, Desmond, why won't you let me sleep?

Once more Capt. Glover ordered himself to sleep and spent another fifteen minutes tossing and turning, staring into the dark, listening to the cries of men who relived the day in their dreams and would be doing so for years.

Dammit. Capt. Glover was put out as if a dense subordinate could not manage a simple task and he had to get up to show him how. He dressed in the dark and figured that's how he would look if the light was on him. The hell with that. Then he was walking faster and faster to the hospital tent. Why wouldn't Doss get out of his head?

He pushed open the flap and for an infuriating moment tangled his hand in the mosquito netting. Then he was inside, in the dim light. He knew where Doss lay. The kid was unconscious, deathly pale, and he had no reaction at all when Glover sat on the edge of his bed. Desmond looked so young. Many of the dead on Hacksaw lost that tough,dirty seasoned soldier look and before the rats got to them, it took no imagination at all to see the boys they had been. Tonight Doss looked far too young to have enlisted. 

"Okay, Desmond, just what is it you want?" 

Glover heard dripping, a light staccato tap tap tap. He looked at the side of the bed. The dripping had become a dribble, and it was blood. Glover leaned down and saw a two foot wide blood puddle under the bed on the ground cloth. All that had to be from Desmond. 

"What the?"

Glover stood up and pulled the covers off Doss who was lying in a pool of blood that extended from one side of the mattress to the other. The mattress dripped blood from both sides like a saturated sponge.

"Sweet Jesus."

Glover pulled Doss upright heedless of the carefully arranged traction for that shattered left arm. Desmond's head lolled back making Glover fear he had died. No God, please no. He stared down the kid's back and saw nothing but blood like thick paint.

"What are you doing?" came a voice close beside him.

That was Douglas, the medic, a guy who enlisted though he was pushing thirty five when Pearl Harbor came. Before the war he was a microbiologist who headed a hospital lab and he was put on the medic track as soon as he signed up. He was, no surprise, excellent. The docs would ask him what he thought was happening with a patient and defer to his opinion.. They trusted him to close up patients after surgery which freed them to treat more of the wounded. He did other stuff beyond his classification and pay grade but ability is ability and wartime is wartime.

"He's bleeding to death." Glover snapped.

Douglas dragged his bare fingers across Doss' back. He abruptly stiffened his hand into a claw and his fingers pulled a fragment of gleaming metal out of the kid's skin. The sliver of shrapnel emerged from the blood like a diver surfacing. The medic dropped it into a metal emesis basin. Clink. Then Douglas grabbed Glover's hand and put it over the wound that was still leaking blood. "Pressure,hard." Glover could not see the wound, only feel it. So small for so much blood. Glover was leaning over the bed, one knee in the blood He pushed so hard on the wound, he was lifting Doss Desmond's back arched. 

A minute later, Douglas pulled Glover's hand from the wound and put in its place a tight packed wad of gauze. He let Doss down on that so the the kid's weight would stanch the flow of blood.

Jamie,another medic on night duty, came to the bedside. He was a tall muscular guy with that prehistoric predator instinct some people have, the sense that tells them that that something is dying, no fight left.

"Start plasma in one vein, normal saline at a second site," Douglas said to Jamie.

Jamie nodded and touched the inside of Doss' spectacularly broken left arm looking for a vein, like a blind man trying to see with his fingertips. 

"Nada," he said. "Can't find a vein here." His voice was sharp, upset.

Douglas looked annoyed but he did not act it. He pulled a small tray of instruments off a shelf at the edge of ward section, brought it to Doss' bed and pulled the covers up so he would not sit in blood. He sat down, took Desmond's injured left arm and laid it across his lap. That had to be excruciating but Desmond gave no sign. Douglas pulled on a glove, cleaned the inside of the Doss' elbow and his forearm He skittered his fingertips over the skin as he swabbed it with alcohol. 

"Got one," Douglas said and stroked a scalpel tip acoss the skin, exposing a vein. He had a needle in and a line a line running normal saline through the needle into the vein all within a minute. He taped it to stabilize the needle and the IV line.

"I couldn't see it, but you felt it, did a cut down in less than a minute, beat your personal best.,"

Jamie said it as if he were reeling off sports statistics. Capt. Glover did not achieve his rank without becoming sensitive to bullshit in all its forms. Jamie's comment did not sound like bs, but real admiration. Douglas detached the iv line, let blood run out of the vein for a second, then put a small test tube to the open end of the needle, collecting blood that looked translucent and watery to Glover's eye. He reattached the iv line.

"'Hated to take even 3 milliliters from him. He can't spare a drop,"Douglas said. "I'll be back in a bit." 

He headed through the surgery to the lab/pharmacy on the far side of the operating tables. Fifteen minutes later, after typing and cross matching that sample he returned with a unit of whole blood. Glover saw big impossible to mistake letters, Type O, on the bottle. Douglas detached the bottle of normal saline and in its place, connected the unit of blood. With horrified fascination, Glover watched the line turn red as the bright blood chased the clear saline down the line into the vein. Ah , at last blood was going the right direction, into the kid. 

"It'll still be running out of him," Glover said. 

Not as much as it was and he'll be dead if I don't make up the blood volume. Gotta get red blood cells into him and God alone knows how much plasma he'll need, then I can patch the leak."

Glover did not like admitting even to himself that he was scared, but Doss' eerie limpness frightened him. The second medic crowded close.  
The guy cleaned Doss' left leg. Glover smelled the alcohol from that. Jamie succeeded at finding a vein at this second site. He hung the plasma,running it wide open. Desmond's eyelids fluttered. 

Douglas had the blood pressure cuff on Desmond's right arm. Inflated the cuff, let the air out, stared at the gauge, did it again and said,.  
"You've rejoined the living." 

Glover felt huge relief. Douglas would not have said that to a corpse.

Douglas turned to Jamie. "Plasma until his blood pressure's normal, then call me, and I'll close up that mess. If a surgeon wanders in, let him know that he almost had another shrapnel bleed-out. Tell him to X ray the entire fucking chest and torso next time even if there are no obvious wounds." 

"'C'mon," he said to Glover, and headed outside the tent. They stood near the flap.

Douglas lit a cigarette and offered one to Glover.

Glover refused.

'So, how did you happen to be here tonight, just now tonight?"

"I dunno."

"You saved his life. So much blood gone, he could have tapped out any minute. Literally. When he came in they x-rayed only the arm and his leg. As he got moved around, that fragment travelled, hit a small artery . One edge is razor sharp. But this kid lucked out, it could have moved deeper inside, cut vessels in his chest or abdomen. That used to happen to guys in the Great War. They looked like they're doing fine, wounds healing well,then weeks after they leave the battlefield they crash."

Douglas exhaled luxuriously. "So why did you check on the kid?" He looked hard at Glover.

Douglas was not going to be put off. Their different ranks did not deter him. He wanted an explanation for this irregularity of a captain checking on a lowly private. An officer did not show favoritism, no matter what he felt. Look at Sgt. Howell with his endless and inventive abuse. No one would suspect that he might care more for one soldier than others under his command though often he did. Howell suggested soldiers harbored unnatural affections not limited to humans, had stunted intelligence, curious appearance, unfortunate ancestory; the closest he came to praise was, 'balls but no brains'.

No one could fault Glover for holding Doss in high regard, not after Hacksaw, but the reflex to be even handed persisted. Glover glanced at Douglas' thin handsome face. Gossip - rife in the military - had it that he was a fag. Someone on leave had seen him in New York with another man, a man who had a limp and used a cane, a 4 F by the look of him, and between them a passel of kids who grabbed the coats of both men, treating each like daddy. They looked like a happy family, laughing and talking, easy smiles and touches for each other.

Douglas wrote home every spare moment. Some men spent their off duty hours writing their wives. Douglas had not talked about his family even when pressed. He did not flash around photos of his wife and kids. So who was he writing to with such devotion? The gossip flared and ended with a brief but vicious fight that had put one of the worst gossips in this very hospital tent. The talk about Douglas being a fag stopped dead. Glover considered that was the best way for a homosexual to handle the situation. No man would admit that a pansy beat him from here to next Tuesday. Douglas did enough damage that no one else wanted to risk it.

"Howell will not lose that leg." Douglas said. 

"So he said," Glover had talked with Sgt.Howell soon after surgery. Glover did not pass along the other thing Howell had said, that it was just as well he was out of the war, he could no longer command Doss. As far as he was concerned Desmond could do no wrong. That's not a workable attitude for a commanding officer. If Doss took it into his head to get drunk before noon, shoot up the barracks tent, joy ride and crash a half track, Howell would chalk it up to youthful high spirits, never mind that youth and high spirits did not survive Hacksaw. Twice Desmond had gone into harm's way to save Howell's life. Could Howell be blamed for his wild partiality? 

Glover knew what Howell was talking about. Exactly.

From inside the tent Jamie called Douglas. .

Douglas dropped the cigarette to the earth, ground it out and went inside.

It occurred to Glover that Douglas had let him off the hook. He had not pushed the issue. Just how had Glover shown up at exactly the moment Doss most needed him? Glover had no answer but he felt that he had passed a crisis. He gasped, almost a sob. He had come so close to failing as an officer, as an honorable man. If Doss had died, if he had let Desmond die...

Glover watched the fireflies swoop and swarm. They were returning after the battle. The fireflies were the best thing about this place.

Beautiful, hypnotic. Glover lost track of time. He had a fleeting nonsensical wish that Desmond were out here watching them with him. .Glover quivered with weariness. He started off toward the barracks tent to his cot. He'd get this bloody uniform off and try again to sleep. He did not trust his legs to get him there.

"Hey." Douglas stood in the tent opening. "Stopped the leak, got his blood pressure almost normal. I told the kid he was harder to kill than a cockroach. He thought that was funny."

Glover didn't. He turned back to the hospital tent. He had to see Desmond.

"God doesn't want him yet," Douglas said. "After we closed up the shrapnel wound, we discarded the mattress. It was actually heavy with all the blood he'd lost."

There was a folding chair beside the bed. Douglas had probably sat there while he sutured Desmond's back. Instant backache to stand and to lean far over the bed as he worked. Glover's legs gave out as he stood by the chair. He sat down hard. The sound woke Doss. 

"Doug tells me you saved my life showing up when you did," Doss said. Glover braced his elbow on the bed and patted Doss' shoulder. 

"The least I could do," he said.

"I am honored to be in your debt," Doss said. If that wasn't a pure Southernism, courtly and gracious. Desmond caught Glover's arm, right behind the bicep.

"Don't leave just yet. I thought it was my time to die. I didn't want that at all."

He felt the sweet weight of Desmond's head on his forearm, then sleep hit Glover like anaesthesia. Douglas tucked a pillow behind Glover's back and it did not waken him. Desmond was clinging to his arm like a child.


End file.
